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Wikileaks Documentary Attacks Assange, Excuses Manning

Julian Assange is a villain, Bradley Manning is a hero: That is the message of We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, a new documentary now showing in theaters nationwide.

We Steal Secrets opens with the story of "WANK," a prank-worm that hit NASA in 1989. It did no damage and was unrelated to Wikileaks — though the film infers it was tied to a group of Australian hackers of which Assange was a part. The WANK sequence serves the role of Star Trek's constantly dying, red shirt-clad ensigns: establishing something is dangerous (in this case, computer hackers).

The film then moves into telling the story of Wikileaks with a focus on Assange, its founder and editor. At first, Assange is cast as a brilliant but rebellious programmer, while Wikileaks is shown as the collaborative effort of like-minded souls — though with Assange firmly at the helm.

Director Alex Gibney then makes the case that Wikileaks' biggest opponent is not the Swedish prosecutors who want to question Assange over sex crime allegations, the U.S. Department of Justice that is examining if a case can be made against him, or the credit card companies that put a hold on donations to Wikileaks. Instead, it's been Assange himself.

Assange is portrayed through interviews with top Wikileaks insiders as sabotaging the group's cohesion through megalomania. After two Swedish women accused Assange of rape, Gibney says, Assange decided their allegations were attacks directed not at him but on Wikileaks as a whole.

"Assange made the decision very early on in his tweets and then in an organizational meeting that actually the two would be brought together, not separated, and I thought that was a crucial decision and in effect signaled the corruption of the organization itself," Gibney told Mashable.

Bradley Manning, meanwhile, is characterized through interviews with others and his own chat logs as a lost hero with a tortured soul, and later, tortured body. Joining the army was Manning's last resort, according to the film, and his struggles with sexual identity and lack of deference to superiors meant he never fit in.

Manning is shown as the ultimate insider-outsider with access that should have been revoked because of his behavior: The Army, the film argues, is responsible for his leaks because it didn't weed him out before he leaked.

We Steal Secrets tears down Assange, who has not been accused of any crime, while building a legal defense for Manning, whose trial over leak allegations will begin next month. And that's the problem with the film: Manning has not yet had his day in court, while Assange remains holed up in Ecuador's London embassy, unwilling to go to Sweden to answer prosecutors' questions. Neither man's story is complete, making it impossible for this film to be the definitive Wikileaks documentary. That will come later.

Have you seen We Steal Secrets? What did you think of it? Share in the comments below.

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